The land around Lyme Regis, where Meryl Streep once stood, in a hood, on the Cobb, is falling into the sea.
The land around Lyme Regis, around the Cobb that made it rich, has always been falling slowly but surely into the sea.
The more we have at stake, the more we try to resist nature. This can be seen in Lyme Regis in highly informative panels about the shifting land formations and fossils of England’s Jurassic Coast, and about the very substantial and expensive work being carried out to try and stop this from happening, or at least to protect the human creations that lie above this slowly but surely moving ground.
Of course you’d want to protect it. So many marvellous people lived here and did marvellous, or at least marvellously fascinating things, this home of fossil collectors, pirates, and novelists.
John Fowles, one of my absolute favourite writers, was born in London, but early on made Lyme Regis his home: first upon a farm, and then in the town after the surrounding land subsided.
For a decade or more, he was honorary curator of the marvellous Lyme Regis museum. It isn't huge, but size can be the least of it with museums. A vast one can leave you cold because you somehow fail to gain purchase; a small one can thrill you with a single item. The very first thing I saw in the Lyme Regis museum was an adze from 250,000 years ago.
Oh my soul, that thing there was held by a human being like me, Two Hundred And Fifty Thousand years ago. The imagining of someone so very much like you but so very different in so many ways is such an otherworldly transporting experience. And yet it can be also utterly of the here and now, because is this not how I also try to understand David Seymour?
The land around Lyme Regis is falling into the sea but not without a spirited and hugely expensive fight by the humans who live there, because look at it, wouldn’t you get awfully attached too?
I wonder if we walk away more easily from this kind of thing. I say this even as battle lines are being drawn over Managed Retreat. They’re only faintly defined at this point, but wait until it gets spelled out as noisily and misleadingly as all the usual suspects did for Three Waters. It might get loud.
But I’d still say we’re more readily inclined to walk away.
Perhaps we live under the shadow, still, of New Zealand novels that cast the land as a brooding dark presence that defeats the man alone every time.
Perhaps we have a perspective of resignation framed by so much seismic turmoil.
Or maybe it’s just that we’re not inclined to spend big chunks of money on anything that isn't either a motorway or a bigger stadium to watch the footy or Adele.
Academic, anyway, for the time being. All the spare money for the foreseeable is going on landlords.
Our beaches are a lot nicer though, eh?
